Farewell to instruction manuals

Having recently bought a Samsung TV, I was surprised to find that it did not come with an Instruction Manual. I was informed that I would be able to download one & print it from my PC; however I was not told that it contained 800+ pages!!!
As I am a silver surfer & not particularly pc savvy with the added disadvantage of an EXTREMELY slow broadband speed, a paper manual would be worth it’s weight in gold to me! Call me old-fashioned but new & up-to-date isn’t always better!

We bought a camera with only a basic manual. We found a company in the UK which could supply an A5 spiral-bound manual. I will try to tell you the details tomorrow. An on-line search finds several such suppliers.

When will businesses realize that not everyone has, or is able to have, a computer directly accessing the internet, or have, (or not want to pay for what we will not use), a smartphone? Luckily I have usually been able to find a manual for an appliance on the manufacturers website by using the library computers, but the absolute mindset of ‘everyone knows this’, or ‘you have to go online to get this’ is extremely annoying.
Mind you, I do find some of the instructions written by someone whose first language is not English very funny, (ha-ha type).

RichardC 58 today posted this in the other instruction book Conversation :

“On the subject of paper manuals, most of them are printed, in small format, on cheap paper which turns brown and crumbles when we save them. Compare them with sales brochures which are printed on glossy acid-free paper… ”

I’ve transpoerted it here because I think it’s a very good point and gives the lie to the supposed environmental justification for the absence of instruction manuals or for providing them n minimal form and survivability.

As a spritly late sixties pensioner, I find both printed manuals and on line ones are both useful, My wife however is not computer savvy at all and requires paper copies.

The last two cameras I have bought have no instruction manual.Go into search bar and seek out Old Time Cameras, they print out a small instruction manual for approx £12 which is printed from the disc(which they search for).Fantastic company with superb service

Before worrying about the manuals media we need to do something about the quality of the instructions. Today there seems to be a contest in all areas to produce the most incomprehensible manual. Worst are inbuilt manuals where you need a manual but need to hack the device to find the manual.
Also its rare that an inbult manual can be read while trying to follow the instructions!!

I think depending on what you do it would be nice to have a hard copy of the manual. There is a lot of great options to choose from. Sometimes it is nice to have a hard copy to have in your hand. There will be times that you will not have internet access to find what you are looking for. I I hope more people will be able to have more hard copies to have.

You can take your manuals with you – if you have a smart phone.

I use DropBox, an application on my phone and laptop.
DropBox copies files from a folder on the laptop to the equivanlent folder on my phone (and visa versa.)

Each time I get a new piece of equipment I put a copy of the manual in the DropBox folder.
(Most manuals are available on-line on the manufacturers web site.)
Within minutes it’s on my phone.

If you are often befuddled by the manual that came with your new technology you are not alone. Some years back a friend and myself considered this problem. We where trying to install a hard drive to a computer system. I had just taught myself how to program in Hexadecimal. I need a way to store my work so I purchased a Hard Drive to was very large 20 Megabytes. This was a lot of years ago and up until then we had been using a tape recorder for program storage. After a few week and more that a few calls to several company’s we got it to work.
After this we sat down to discuss why we had so much trouble understanding he manual that now made perfect since to use. We came to realist the problem is quite simple. The person who wrote the manual wrote it for himself. Therefore only a person who knew what he knew could understand it. That is why authors are making money writing manuals called “For Dummies”. It is not that the end user is a Dummy it is that it is written for people that do not know the product before they read the manual.

I think I’m fairly competent with figuring out technology but the problem I face is when you get more complicated appliances like washing machines with 50 drying modes you have to press through. Then you refer to the manual with the reaction being ???. It should be possible to follow the directions without having done a plumbing or engineering course. My area is computers, not appliances. What happened to:
– If you want to dry clothing step 1. press this (a) if you want this press this first (b) if you want this etc. 2. press this to start.

Sometimes the vague icon-based buttons to make it work in various countries just makes it all the more confusing.

I’d rather be patronised by the instructions than lost in them.

I have noticed that items like laptops no longer are supplied with paper manuals so you have to switch them on to be told on an on line manual how to unpack and switch it on, a bit late I think!!!